Alien Invasion (Book 4): Annihilation

by Sean Platt

  Part was curiosity, wanting to see if the thing seemed to call from where they imagined it had been hidden.

  The other part was human guilt: a desire to savor the great regret over what he’d helped to cause, just as the others had spawned so much pain (both human and inhuman) to him.

  CHAPTER 91

  Lila sensed the cessation of motion more than she actually felt it. Being in the shuttle did something to her equilibrium — something about the sense of being high in the air in what looked like a bubble from the inside combined with a force that felt like an invisible seat belt. Her fear was making everything worse.

  Her father was alive. Maybe. Kind of. Twice.

  Lila didn’t know how to feel about that. Mostly, she felt afraid, and assumed it would be that way for a while.

  When the shuttle slowed and then began to descend, Lila wondered if they’d reached their destination. Despite the confines and the situation’s general oddity, Clara seemed to have already adjusted. She kept assuring her mother that there was a destination, that they were on their way, and that there was hope after all. She’d been skipping around the ship. Hugging Grandpa Meyer: the sunken-faced man she’d never met but whom she recognized as kin immediately. And she hugged the apparent obvious Meyer as well: the man who’d shared her home, but who’d never, it seemed, actually been Lila’s father. Cameron was the only person to leave their human pile. He was standing by the well-dressed Meyer now, acting like they were in a business meeting.

  But there was no mountain where they descended, and Clara and Cameron had both mentioned one. Lila had been spacing out, letting her mind go away whenever it wanted, trying not to consider the losses she could barely accept: Trevor, her mother, even Raj. Her husband hadn’t been all bad. She’d loved him, once.

  But not now. She couldn’t handle any of that now.

  They seemed to have been slowly moving away, the two Meyers and Cameron discussing topics unknown. And now here they were, slowly coming down, not across the sea, not seemingly where Clara had indicated.

  “There,” Cameron said, pointing through the shuttle’s floor near the edge.

  Lila looked where he was pointing. She saw a long canyon. A short cliff. And, as they came closer, what looked like a demolished building, like a scattered pile of charred matchsticks when seen from high above.

  The steering Meyer moved his hands. Leaned slightly. The shuttle came lower.

  “What are we doing?” Lila whispered to Christopher. He shook his head.

  “By the cliff?” said standing Meyer.

  “The arch. Do you see it?”

  “There?”

  “They knew it was here. The motherships knew; they came right to it. How can you not know there’s a money pit on this land?” Cameron looked at the frail human Meyer Dempsey. “And you. You were in the ship that parked here. For months, hanging over my father’s lab like a beehive.”

  “I was in a cell,” said the human.

  “And I can’t see all they can,” said the tall Meyer. “Only bits and pieces, like parts of a dream.”

  “The pit is under the arch,” Cameron said, apparently not caring to inquire further.

  The ship lowered.

  But whatever the healthy-seeming Meyer didn’t know or couldn’t see about the Astral collective, it didn’t extend to the details of connecting their shuttle to a pit in the ground, beneath the stone arch.

  They waited, hovering.

  The feeling of static returned as the ship seemed to refuel, drawing energy from its underground depot like a car at an old-time gas station from back before the world ended.

  CHAPTER 92

  The refueling, such as it was, didn’t take long. Five minutes, and it seemed to be finished — or done enough, apparently, to fill the tanks or batteries or whatever it was that would get them where they needed to go. Jeanine wanted to ask. She knew there had been a mothership suckling power from that pit for months when the Moab ranch had been whole, and that not long ago they’d watched a second do the same, again for a longer time.

  Maybe the batteries were bigger on the motherships, or the tanks were deeper. It made sense. But she couldn’t shake the feeling that their short stop was more about safety than anything else. They couldn’t use the pit below what was once Heaven’s Veil for obvious reasons … but maybe this pit, too, would soon be occupied by massive ships suckling power. Charging up for whatever was coming, now that they’d be able to find Thor’s Hammer, too.

  The ship slowly backed away from the arch. Then Piper Dempsey said, “Wait.”

  The ship ceased. Piper stood. She walked toward the thing’s curved outer wall, placing her hands against what looked like lightly fogged glass. She was facing away from the arch and the money pit, as Cameron called it. On the opposite end of the large ship from the others, looking toward the cliff lab, past the house of debris.

  Coffey stood. She crossed the space, skirting wide around the pilot in the middle.

  “What?”

  “There.”

  Piper pointed. At nothing.

  “What?”

  “You don’t see it?”

  The hard, cracked land was bare, nothing but bristly weeds, intermittent and hardy. The particular patch of ground at the end of Piper’s finger didn’t have a single feature. Yet still, Jeanine felt a chill.

  She turned her head slightly.

  Defocused her eyes.

  And saw the same shadow as before, sitting patiently in the middle of the dry land like a dog awaiting its bone.

  “It knew we’d come here to charge,” Piper said.

  “Good for it.” She looked at Meyer — the standing Meyer; they’d need a way to tell them apart before the second fattened back up. “Let’s go.”

  “No,” said Piper. “Don’t.”

  Coffey watched the thing come closer. The shuttle wasn’t far off the ground. If it could leap as well as it could spread across an entire courtyard and fill it with opaque blackness, it could reach them in a single bound. She thought suddenly of the air around them becoming like that again: day turned to night in a blink. Would they be able to fly away? Or could it follow them forever, even off the ground?

  “It’s waiting for us.”

  “All the more reason to leave.”

  “It can’t get to us. It’s stuck out there.”

  “Good.”

  “It’s stuck here. In Moab. It ran here. But it has its limits.”

  “How the hell do you know so much?”

  Piper looked toward Clara. She gazed back out at the thing, now seemingly able to gaze directly at it, and said, “I can feel it. I can feel how it is. How things are for it now.”

  She turned to the Meyers.

  “Open the door.”

  Jeanine felt a jolt of panic. She grabbed Piper’s wrists as if it were her hands nearing the controls. She looked back at the pilot. Her voice left less sure than she would have liked.

  “Go. Fly.”

  Piper pushed Jeanine away. “It saved us.”

  “It saved itself.”

  Piper slowly shook her head, still looking through the shuttle’s skin. There were footsteps from the rear as the better-dressed of the Meyers approached on polished loafers.

  Jeanine turned to him.

  “Don’t open the door. It has her mesmerized or something. We can’t know what the hell that thing is. We don’t have any idea.”

  Meyer, peering out, said, “I know exactly what it is.”

  He set his hand to the shuttle’s wall beside Piper’s. The door boiled away. And the shadow leaped aboard, wafting through the arch like smoke.

  CHAPTER 93

  They slept.

  The shuttle didn’t move like lightning. It was simple physics, Piper supposed; you put a human in something that accelerates and decelerates in an instant, and the G-forces liquified their skeletons. She had time to watch the land speed by far below, to see the mountains become the plains, reliving their trek from New York in revers
e. To watch the breadbasket approach. And as they moved east, she had time to see the sun set in a hurry.

  And she had time to sleep, exhausted in spite of it all.

  Piper woke when her arm moved seemingly of its own accord — Lila, sliding beside her.

  “Hey, kid,” Piper said.

  “I’m sorry. I just … I couldn’t sleep.”

  Piper looked around the shuttle. One or both of the Meyers must have been human enough yet to sense the mood and had dimmed the lights. The ship’s interior turned out to be as liquid as its doors; after they’d begun moving in earnest something had made walls drip up from the floor to create rooms. There was even a bathroom. It was a hole in the floor that sent waste God knew where, but it worked.

  “Where is Clara?”

  “I left her with Chris.”

  “Why aren’t you with Chris?”

  Lila acted like she hadn’t heard, and Piper spared her the dignity of asking again. She knew why. Lila had lost half of her family today. Piper was the only mother she had, even though she was an adult herself.

  “Has Clara told you where we’re going?”

  “She’s out. Conked. Like a kid, actually. Has Cameron told you?”

  Piper shook her head. The air was quiet, America’s passage silent below.

  “He’s out, too. Coffey punched him flat, coming out of the city. Did you know that?”

  Lila laughed. The small sound comforted Piper in a way that would have been hard to explain.

  “Cameron said Heather also gave him a kiss to give to Meyer, but that he’s not planning to deliver it.”

  Lila looked like she wanted to follow her laugh with a smile, but Piper instantly knew that she shouldn’t have said it. Lila sniffed, trying to keep a brave face. But her eyes watered, and she wiped them as if trying to deny her feelings.

  After a moment, Lila said, “Piper?”

  “Yes?”

  “What were you arguing with Jeanine about earlier? At the door? It sounded like you wanted to let something in with us, but she didn’t.”

  “You couldn’t see it?”

  Lila shook her head against Piper’s chest.

  “It’s like a shadow. It takes an eye trick to see it.” She sighed. “I only know that we need it, that it needs us, and that it’s been a friend. I don’t know what it is. But Meyer does. He calls it a Pall, and it seems to be part of him. Something he brought to the collective that they either didn’t expect or didn’t know how to deal with. Something, maybe, that they forced out like pus from a wound. At least that’s the feeling I get from Meyer.”

  “Which Meyer?”

  Piper chuckled. “Meyer Meyer. Charlie just calls the other one Anomaly.”

  “Catchy name.”

  “Mmm.”

  “Clara says he wants his own name. Because he’s not really my dad, even though he has all his memories. He’s … something else.”

  “What name?”

  “Clara says she likes Kindred.”

  “Hmm, sounds like Clara. But I’m not sure if I can get used to calling him that. But I guess it’s better than having two Meyers. Or two husbands.”

  Piper considered things through a moment of quiet. Even setting aside her past with Cameron, did she now have two husbands? Would she make love to the man Meyer had always been to welcome him tearfully home, or hold allegiance to the copy who didn’t seem to realize until recently that he even was a copy? The knots felt tangled, apt to snag.

  The quiet beat continued. Although Piper was beginning to realize that there was a sound after all. A faint hum, like unearthly engines.

  “So we just go? Wherever Cameron says?”

  Piper looked down. Brushed a sheaf of dark hair away from her forehead.

  “And where Clara says. I think they share something, Cameron and Clara. Cameron thinks she’s the reason we went to Heaven’s Veil, even though we thought it was for something else. He thinks we were supposed to get Clara. She was calling him, maybe.”

  “Why?”

  “So she could help him find what he needed inside his own head. She helped him figure out where this ‘Thor’s Hammer’ weapon was, anyway.”

  “It’s not a weapon.”

  Piper and Lila both looked up. Charlie was standing in the doorway, still dressed as if for a day at the unfashionable office.

  Piper felt her brow wrinkle. “What?”

  “I talked to Meyer. Both of them. I’m not eager to believe anything they say, but what they told me fits Benjamin’s data. Things that have been bothering me as I’ve been trying to puzzle out what he left in Moab. He was definitely onto something, and it’s corroborated by a lot of ancient aliens theory. It all fits, now that I’ve heard what they have to say. And I believe it. Enough to bank on.”

  Piper looked at Lila. They both looked at Charlie.

  “So what is Thor’s Hammer if it isn’t a weapon?” Piper asked.

  “I believe it’s the Ark of the Covenant, and I think it contains an archive, designed for our judgment.”

  THE END

  SHIT FROM BRAINS

  This is the first time I (Johnny) have written anything resembling an author’s note for a book in the Invasion series at the time the book was completed. I did write one for Invasion (Book 1), but only after publication. Like a month or more later. And I only did that under duress because it turns out people weren’t understanding the book’s point, especially where that final scene was concerned. So it was a reactive author’s note, not a proactive one.

  Trying to change that now. I’m doing it by writing shit like this, that’s not called an Author’s Note because I’d usually rather gargle glass than get fancy enough to write a Note From The Esteemed Author. You call your end notes Shit From Brains, and the expectations lower a lot. You can do things like dash one off before running to the gym because, holy crap, are you exhausted.

  So here’s this book’s story. Funny how things never turn out right.

  Before writing the book you’ve just read, Sean and I wrote a book called Dead City. It may be my favorite of all the books Realm & Sands has written, with the possible exception of Axis of Aaron. Dead City comes out mid-2016 in ebook and print and in audio format before that. (If that confuses you, you’re not alone. It’s a weird thing we’re doing, but the short answer is that you should be on our mailing list, where all questions are eventually answered. You can join at the link below.)

  http://realmandsands.com/joinus/

  Anyway, Dead City — a zombie book with a twist and an All the President’s Men vibe — was hard as hell to write. It took us longer than we’d anticipated; it required a bunch of extra story meetings to figure out; I had to have conversations with my professional scientist friend to iron out its quirks. We knew we were planning to end the year with 2015’s nonfiction book (Iterate & Optimize) and another mindbender like Axis (The Devil May Care). Those two were a heavy pair, and we needed to write Annihilation before either of them because people were clamoring for the preorder date and bitching that it wasn’t sooner.

  So I said, “Okay, dude. Annihilation has to be simple. Not boring and not uninteresting by any stretch, but simple.” Simple like Invasion: The people in it have one task, and they go about doing it. Of course that can be a real fucker of a job, and they can run into all sorts of trouble along the way (and because we respect and love our readers, we’d be sure to add all sorts of exciting trouble), but it should be a singular quest. Something that can be detailed and thrilling in execution but straightforward in concept.

  So Sean gives me Concept #1. And I’m like, “How is this simple?” (I won’t spoil it. You’ll see much of what began life as Concept #1 in the next book in this series.) So he set it aside and tried again.

  Concept #2, which he knew better than to outline before asking me, was equally complicated. So back he went.

  And by Concept #3, Sean comes to me all excited, like he’s sure this is the one. And he goes, “I’ve got it! They just need to blow up He
aven’s Veil!”

  At this point, I put my palms over my face.

  Because yeah, that sounds simple. But shit, it’s just not. Because there’s nothing established there. Why would anyone blow up Heaven’s Veil? You can’t just announce it. You have to build a case. You have to explain why that might happen, and you have to figure out how it could happen. Because remember: This crew had been trying to attack Heaven’s Veil for two years, according to the story in Colonization. They hadn’t made a dent. So how were they going to suddenly just nuke the place?

  And so we thought about the Apex. About how they could blow that up.

  You know. The alien pyramid that’s made of something other than glass. Another thing they couldn’t destroy.

  At some point, while mulling over our desire for simplicity and our readers’ craving for the fast-paces stories that come with straightforward narratives, I had an idea. I got to thinking of the Pixar movie The Incredibles. You know how Mr. Incredible realizes that the only thing strong enough to damage the Omnidroid is the Omnidroid itself. And then he makes it yank out its own brain? Well, only Astral technology could blow up Astral stuff.

  Which meant our story had become about the Astrals blowing shit up. Or humans finding a way to make Astral technology work for them.

  You know — because it makes sense that they’d be able to do that.

  Ultimately (and this always happens with our stories; ALWAYS), the problems at hand found a way to harmonize with the questions we’d wanted to answer anyway. So: the fact that Meyer was a copy? We had that to work with. We’d always figured the real Meyer would return and that the unspooling that happened in the first fake Meyer would recur in the second fake Meyer, creating allies. We’d sort of thought the Astrals’ inability to understand the dissociation of modern humans would confuse them enough to come into play, and we knew emotions — things like Meyer’s quiet love for Heather and his loyalty to his family, not to mention the death of a son — would cause glitches even in the copies of Meyer that the Astrals hadn’t anticipated.